Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract leads, grow your customer base, and reach your business goals. However, countless people struggle to get the attention they need.
Part of the reason for this is that there’s too much competition. Many businesses use content marketing to reach their audiences, connect with them, turn them into customers, and grow sales. So, getting people to notice you can be difficult.
If you are struggling to attract the attention you need through your content, you’ve come to the right place.
Today we’ll cover 10 mistakes that get your content zero attention and ways to avoid them.
Let’s dive in!
SUBSCRIBE TO INCOME PATROL
Get updates on the latest posts and more from Income Patrol straight to your inbox.
1. NOT HAVING A NICHE
This is one of the worst mistakes that make it difficult for people to follow and engage with your content. If you write about everything and anything that comes to mind, you won’t get the attention you need. It will be difficult for you to get traffic to your blog because people don’t know why they should follow you.
If you have too many things to write about and don’t know what to focus on, your content won’t be effective. You’ll get zero readers or a few who aren’t even interested in becoming your customers.
You need to pick a niche and stick to it to attract the right people, build an audience, and get buyers.
Using your content to attract prospects and turn them into customers becomes easier when you have a niche. People need to know what you write or blog about. That is the only way they can decide whether to follow you or not. That’s the best way for you to attract the right audience and make sure you build relations with people who are most likely to buy your product.
So, decide what sort of content you want to create and stick to it. Consider your main offer and pick a niche that’s in line with your business. Doing this helps you connect with the right audience, build industry authority, and ensure conversions.
2. NOT UNDERSTANDING YOUR AUDIENCE
Your content strategy is only effective when your target audience engages with it and takes the desired action. The main reason you are failing to get the attention you need is that you don’t understand your audience.
Maybe you don’t have a target audience or you’ve defined your target audience but don’t understand their needs.
The only way to succeed is to not only choose the right niche but define your target audience and create content that’s relevant to them. The kind that makes their lives easier, helps them reach certain goals or adds some sort of value to their lives.
Understand what your readers want to get them to engage with your content. Identify their interests, challenges, common problems, needs, and cater to them. Provide practical solutions to their problems, help them mitigate specific challenges, and reach certain goals.
Recognize that it’s not about you or what you want to write. It’s about your readers and what they want.
Analyze customer behavior to learn more about the type of content they are interested in.
Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Snaplytics, and Mentionlytics.
These tools make it easy for you to understand your target audience and create content they are interested in.
3. NO CLEAR GOALS
This is another common mistake that marketers make. You’ve selected your niche and defined your target audience but don’t have clear content goals. You just write content without stating what you want to achieve from it.
This makes it difficult for you to track results and determine whether or not your content is effective.
So, write down your goals and state what you want to achieve from your content. Consider your monthly, quarterly, and yearly business goals to ensure you remain on track. Make sure your content goals align with your business goals for that particular period. For example, if you want to increase sales this year, your content strategy should help you achieve that.
The content you share on your website, social media pages, and blog should be centered on getting more conversions. So, you can educate prospects about your product, use promotions, hold interesting events, and so on.
The most important thing is to always have a goal in mind before writing and publishing your content.
4. NEGLECTING SEO
Sometimes the main reason people aren’t engaging with your work is that they can’t find it.
Optimizing your content for SEO is the most important part of content marketing. That is how people find and interact with your work.
If your audience doesn’t know you exist, how do you expect them to find you?
It’s up to you to ensure your content is visible and reaches prospects.
So, optimize every page and post for SEO. Make sure you rank high on the SERPS to increase traffic to your site and boost engagement.
Do keyword research and use meta keywords and meta descriptions throughout your content for visibility.
Another thing you need to avoid is writing boring headlines because they determine who reads your post and who doesn’t.
Remember, you only have a few seconds to convince users to click on your headline. So, make it count. Write catchy headlines to attract attention and get more clicks.
Your headline should state what the user will benefit from your post and make it easy for users to understand what you are writing about.
Topics that normally get attention are informative, educational, controversial, assuring, and motivational. So, make sure yours fall into one of those categories.
5. NOT USING MULTIPLE CONTENT FORMATS
When you write text-based content that has no images or videos, you are missing out on the opportunity to get more conversions.
Different people prefer different content formats. Long-form content isn’t interesting to read. That’s why you aren’t getting the attention you need. You need to add at least 1 image to retain your audience’s attention. Your content must be interactive and keep the reader on your pages longer.
So, use multiple content formats to capture attention, boost engagement, and get more leads. Don’t just stick to text only. Incorporate high-res images and high-quality videos into your strategy. Keep your audience interested in engaging with your content, following along, and looking forward to what you’ll share next.
Understand that while some of your readers prefer text, others favor videos. So, cater to everyone’s needs.
When you create multiple content formats, you attract more readers, reach a bigger audience, and get more conversions. So, prioritize it.
Another mistake you need to avoid is overlooking evergreen content.
Evergreen content ensures traffic and constantly attracts attention. It gets people coming to your blog years after publication because it is always relevant.
So, incorporate it into your strategy to increase your readership.
Identify and curate content around topics that stay relevant and useful to your audience 10 or so years down the line. For example, if you are a fitness blogger, one of your topics can be “Effective ways to lose weight without going to the gym.” If you are a tech writer, use “How technology has changed our lives and what we can do about it” as one of your topics.
6. NOT ENOUGH CTAS
This is one of the most common mistakes that have a huge impact on your overall goals. If you write high-quality content that targets the right audience but fail to show them what to do next, you are losing out on sales.
Your content either has zero calls to action or does not have enough. That is why you aren’t seeing the results you want.
Perhaps people are reading your content but none are buying. But how do you expect them to buy or join your mailing list if you don’t ask them to?
Add at least one CTA on every post to guide readers through your content and show them the next step to take. If you want your audience to read an article related to the one that they’re reading, add a link.
If you want them to visit your product page and learn more about your available packages, add a call to action. If you want your readers to subscribe to your emails, add a CTA. If you want them to know about the new course you’ve created, tell them about it and add a link to the course.
The best way to get more traffic, boost engagement, and turn readers into buyers is to show users what to do after interacting with your posts. Clear and simple CTAs help you achieve that.
7. FOCUSING ON QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
It’s quite tempting to write and publish as quickly as you can. However, producing low-quality content can ruin your reputation and frustrate your readers.
When you are only concerned about quantity and overlook quality, you lose out on sales. Your audience loses interest in your content and you risk losing them.
While it’s important to publish consistently, it’s equally important to curate high-quality content.
That makes it easy for your audience to favor your content, trust your advice, and show interest in becoming your customers.
If you focus too much on quantity, you also risk going-off topic and writing content that’s not relevant to your audience. Making it difficult for you to retain your audience, become a trusted source, attract leads, and see a return on investment.
When you rush through the content creation process you make lots of mistakes. Your content will have too many typos and retaining your audience becomes difficult.
Failing to edit or proofread your work is another reason you are failing to attract your audience. Too many writing mistakes force your readers to leave. It’s not fun to read content that’s not edited and has too many errors. So, editing should be one of your top priorities.
Don’t just write and fail to revise. Review your work as many times as you can and work with an editor to ensure success.
Use grammar checker tools like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and The Hemingway Editor to detect errors and ensure you produce quality content.
8. NO CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY
Your success depends on how well you market yourself. If you don’t have a content marketing strategy, how will you track results and improve?
Not having a content marketing strategy or failing to see the importance of having one is another mistake that gets your content little or no attention.
You have to come up with an effective strategy that will help you reach your goals and increase your conversion rates. You have to decide how often you’ll post, what sort of content you’ll write, who writes blog post articles, who will edit the content, who creates social media posts, who will monitor comments, and so on.
Create a content schedule and stick to it to make it easy for your audience to interact with it. Know your audience, identify the best times to post, and publish when they are most likely to respond or see what you’ve shared.
Consider the platform you are using. Find out the best times to post on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and upload during those hours. This makes it easy for you to attract comments, understand your customers, and share interesting content that encourages likes and shares.
9. NOT PROMOTING YOUR CONTENT
Writing quality content, understanding your audience, and publishing consistently isn’t enough. You have to promote your content and make sure it gets in front of your audience.
If you don’t market it, it will be hard for you to capture attention and get people interested in what you are sharing.
So, make it a point to always promote your content and let your potential customers know about your recent publications.
Use social media, your website, and your emails. However, don’t focus too much on getting people to engage with your content and less on interacting with theirs.
Show interest in other people’s posts as well to get them interested in what you have to say.
Comment on their posts, hit ‘like’ when you see something interesting and retweet relevant tweets to encourage them to do the same.
Join relevant conversations and leave helpful comments to raise interest. Show that you value other people’s content and are interested in hearing what they have to say.
Reply to every comment on your blog and appreciate positive feedback. Show your readers you value their opinion and are happy they are part of your network.
Interacting with your audience is a great way to get noticed by the right people, connect with them, form relations, and turn them into customers.
10. USING THE WRONG PLATFORMS
Part of the reason you’re failing to attract attention is that you are using the wrong platforms. You are either using the wrong platforms to publish your content or to market it and that makes it difficult for you to reach your audience.
The platforms you choose play an important role in ensuring success. They can either help you reach your goals or make it difficult to do so. Therefore, know which channels to use and which ones to avoid.
Consider your niche, your audience, and your goals when picking a publishing platform. Answer key questions: “What do I want to achieve?”, “Where does my target audience spend most of their time?”, “What’s the best platform to publish my content”, and “Which platforms can I use to market my content best?”
Knowing what you want to achieve and publishing your content on the right platform accelerates results and helps you build an audience. So, consider your content goals when picking a publishing platform.
Work with one that gives you the flexibility you need and ensures you reach your target audience.
Decide between creating a blog and working with publishing platforms like Medium. Choose what you want but make sure your choice gets you the results you need.
Another option is to go with both options. You can launch a blog and also work with a publishing platform. Depending on your goals, audience, and preferences.
Marketing your content on the wrong platforms can also make it difficult to attract the attention you need. So, if you have little or no blog traffic or social media posts engagement, you are using the wrong marketing platform.
You have to promote your content on platforms used and favored by your audience. Not ones you like. That is the most effective way to reach them and get them to your blog.
Think about your target audience and the platforms they prefer, when choosing your marketing channels. Only work with ones that your potential customers prefer and spend most of their time on.
Another thing that makes it difficult to attract attention is failing to monitor performance. So, don’t just write, publish, promote your content and call it a day. Measure results and find out how your content is performing to determine what works and what doesn’t. Monitor your posts and track results to ensure success.
LIMITED-TIME OFFER!
With LIFETIME ACCESS membership ($67) you have access to ALL exclusive materials (current and upcoming) for lifetime. We create new courses, ebooks, webinars and downloads on a regular basis. This offer expires soon and will be replaced with monthly-paid subscription, so hurry up! Get access HERE!